So It Come To This: Your Wife Wants To Homeschool
You are reading this for one reason: your wife wants to homeschool.
A few questions that might be going through your mind right now include:
- Does she know the kids will never be socialized?
- Has she realized it will cut your family budget in half?
- Did it occur to her that Christians need to be in the world?
- What will happen if our kids are not with their peers?
- Don’t kids need to hear other kids ask questions to help them learn?
- Will your kids ever get time away from the house (and you?)
- Won’t the kids being around all the time drive your wife crazy?
- How will your wife have outside interests or time for herself?
- Is your wife even qualified to teach your kids?
These, and possibly a thousand other concerns, are running through your mind now that your wife wants to homeschool. I know they went through mine when my wife said she wanted to homeschool!
But I Teach At A Public School…
At the time, I was a public school teacher. I believed in the mission and purpose of public education. When we became parents, I had been a teacher for six years. (The average teacher lasts three years.) Before that, I had spent four years in college learning how to teach. I had already dedicated ten years of my life to teaching, and my wife wants to homeschool?!?
Share My Experience, Kids!
In my mind, I envisioned my children would be educated the same way I had been educated. My kids would experience twelve miserable, soul-crushing, seemingly endless years in public school.
You know, like everyone else.
They would be at school for seven hours a day, with at least an hour of homework at night on top of that. Very likely it would leave them depressed, tired, and so stressed that they would gain 30 pounds of extra weight by high school graduation. You know, just like me.
Yeah, I wanted my kids to have the same experience I did, complete with:
- Bullies
- Two broken wrists
- No friends
- The inability to think for myself
- Easy opportunities to access sex, drugs, and alcohol
My first experience with pornography (third grade!), the police, alcohol, and drugs all came from my time spent in public school. I was in the room next door when a kid collapsed and died. I was at school during the Columbine Shooting and 9/11. What better way to learn about these things than the filter of the hyper-liberal and away from my family?
But School Can Be Good?
Were there any good memories of school . . . um . . . no. I hated every minute. My first day of kindergarten was where I got lost, couldn’t find my class and ended up crying until someone helped me. The misery continued on until my senior graduation where the principal didn’t know my name. We had to park a mile away and I had to walk with this billowy cape like an idiot. I guess my experience might be different from others. Although if you look at suicide and depression rates among kids in high school it seems like my experience was pretty normal.
Why Did I Become A Teacher?
Most teachers fall into one of two categories. They loved high school so much they never want to leave it or they hated it so much they wanted to change it for future generations. Neither set of teachers get to do what they really want, and they all end up leaving the profession quickly. (Three years, remember?)
All of a sudden, as a thirty-years old father, I’m defending Public education?
Being A Teacher Didn’t Make It Better
My stories didn’t get better when I became a teacher. If anything, they simply became more horrifying!
I’ve broken up countless fights. I’ve watched a video of a mentally handicapped student coerced into removing a banana from the pants of another student. I’ve had to talk kids into not hurting themselves because their hearts were broken. I’ve had to walk boys to the bathroom so they wouldn’t pee all over the walls.
Yeah, I was only in public education for six years. Long-term teachers from bigger schools have stories that will really make your jaw drop.
So You Loved High School?
Okay, let’s look at the other side. Maybe you were a high school stud. Boys wanted to be you, girls wanted to be with you. You won state in every sport, got the lead in the school play, married your high school sweetheart, and brought all the kids of your school together under a banner dedicated to your awesomeness. Well good for you!
So what?
All of those were high school accomplishments. Do you still brag about them? That’s sad. I can’t wallow in self-pity because of my high school experiences. So why would you live in exaltation about your high school days?
If those were the best days of your life, then I pity you even more than I pity myself. We have another sixty years of life after school. High school should not be the pinnacle of our lives. (And if extracurricular activities are why we send our kids to public school, then I think we have missed the purpose of school entirely).
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Once I Finally Said Yes To Homeschooling
It took my wife two years to convince me to let her homeschool, and I felt like the biggest idiot ever after I relented. It was more like a child clutching a rock while his parents offer him a cookie.
You realize they can get their school work done in three hours?
Why was I in school for seven?
You realize they will be closer to YOU, their parent?
Why was I separated from my parents for twelve years?
You realize they will meet a ton of people in the real world?
Why was I forced to see the same people every day?
You realize public education is failing to prepare students academically?
- Test scores at all-time lows and continuing to drop.
- Constant fundraisers to fund tax-payer funded institutions.
- Teen pregnancies, drug use, suicides at all-time highs.
- Hyper-liberal, social justice teaching is at every turn.
Why are we still defending public education?
COMPREHENSIVE SEX EDUCATION is literally the devil’s work and is taught in schools across America. (Go ahead and watch this video.)
Good teachers are leaving in droves, and sharing their experiences.
The teachers unions are holding cities hostage.
Teachers are sexually assaulting students in unprecedented numbers.
Your Kid’s School Is Not Different
Everyone thinks this bad stuff happens in a different school. MY SCHOOL where MY KIDS go wouldn’t do this. MY SCHOOL wouldn’t teach that.
I hate to break it to you, folks. It is in every school, every town, every state. I taught in the middle of nowhere and had to deal with sex, drugs, and inappropriate teachers. I taught in the middle of a city and had to deal with the same things. IT IS EVERYWHERE.
The complaints are constant and should give even the hardest skeptic pause. We shouldn’t need constant reminders to “Support our Schools” if they actually did their job.
But it is good for my kids to experience these hardships!
So what’s the next argument? It’s good for them? Builds character. Just like the real world. They need to be exposed to it sometime.
Really?
Maybe we should smash our head against a wall to experience dementia before our time.
Perhaps we should eat food only through a tube in our stomach to know what that is like.
In fact, why not break all our fingers to understand arthritis?
The argument that kids need to experience the public education system is crazy!
We don’t go out of our way to experience hardships. It is not our plan to make sure we can experience hardships in the future. As adults, we know that trouble will come at times, and we know we will deal with it when it comes. Life will throw problems at us in due course; we don’t need to speed up the process. Our kids certainly don’t need us speeding up the process for them either!
If you put the weight of the world on a five-year old, this isn’t education. This is stripping them of their innocence, their love of learning and their love of life.
What about your Christian faith?
Public school is bad, and I haven’t even mentioned the most important problem: they leave God out.
Schools will actively turn your child away from God. It isn’t a byproduct, it isn’t an accident or an opening of minds with alternative ideas. No, this is a constant applied attack on the values and ideals we hold sacred. It is deliberate, and it is constant.
The public school system does not wage a fair fight here. Schools don’t even try to be objective, or present both sides of the issue. I had never heard of Creation until I was a Sophomore in high school, where the teacher openly mocked it and God. My eighth grade teacher spent two minutes on the crucifixion, the single most defining moment in history. Beyond that, we certainly never discussed Bible stories, history surrounding the Bible or the books of the Bible.
This might normal until you consider I did multiple (multiple!) projects on Greek gods. I took an entire class on Buddhism and Hinduism. Oh, and I was given a front row seat to Diversity Day-the precursor to the modern god of diversity and social justice.
We never discussed the most well-known, most influential, number-one best selling book of all time. (Hint: That’s the Bible.) The book people literally die for in other countries. That book seems to have just slipped their minds.
I had to sit through multiple sex education classes . They made sure those were taught. But the Bible, or even a Biblical take on sexuality, was never discussed.
Public School Is The Worst
Public school is the single worst thing you can put a kid through.
Seriously, letting your kid run naked in the backyard will probably do a better job than the public education system. It literally can’t get any worse.
So your wife wants to homeschool?
That is awesome!
This is one of the most exciting, best thing that could ever happen to your family. Seriously.
Your kids are about to be smarter, more motivated, better adjusted, and more social than 95% of the American population. Across socio-economic lines, across racial lines, across achievement lines, the stats are showing that homeschool kids far and away out-preform their public school counterparts.
I don’t even need to mention the Christian side of things! Public school is so bad, even secular parents who are not interested in teaching religion should (and are) seriously consider homeschooling.
Homeschool kids tend to do better in college, make more money in life, are happier, and closer to their parents.
The best part?
You don’t have to do it.
What Your Wife Signed Up For
Your wife just doubled her work load! (Maybe even after quitting her job.)
She gets the stress, the headache, and the whining. Your wife will be in the trenches of dealing with your kids on a daily basis. That means she will see the best, good, bad and ugly that comes with being around your kids all day long.
You will get all the benefits, all of the glory and all of the pride. Your job will be to walk in and see the results of those days. (Bring chocolate home some days.) As time goes along, you will get to witness people being amazed by what your kids are doing. And hopefully they will get to be amazed most of all by who they have become-Christians who love the Lord and work hard as productive citizens in society.
She gets the work. Homeschooling is work. There will curriculum tweaking, planning, record keeping, field trips, coop meetings and more for her. Your wife is signing up for a LOT more on her to-do list for each day. Her work will look different than it might have in the past but it will be work.
She will have to manage a tighter budget. Of course, you can help with managing finances but trust me, they will be on her mind too. The budget might be a little tighter for your family. (Although with the fundraisers, extracurricular expenses, and school-supply lists, I’m not sure that is true anymore).
The Job Of The Homeschool Dad
So what should a homeschool dad do?
I offer moral and emotional support when she has a hard day. To be fair, I did the same when she had a tough day at work before we homeschooled. The support from us as husbands should be the same to our wives. The only difference will be why she is having a hard day. Before it could have been a rough day at the office, now it might have been a rough day teaching math.
I go to homeschool conferences. These conferences are filled with books, awesome people, and in another city with different food. Basically this is not much of a hardship. In fact, we sometimes use it as an extended date weekend!
I go to work everyday. My world has changed very little. In fact, the kids are excited to see me when I get home. (They are kind of sick of mom.) My wife is excited to see me. (She is kind of sick of them.) I get to be a superstar when I get home.
I can go do stuff on a weekday.
When I get off of work, the kids aren’t wiped out from a seven hour school day. In fact, they are normally still fun to be around. (My wife however . . . but she was wiped after work anyway…)
Side Benefits Of Homeschooling
Okay, there are more benefits to homeschooling than I could mention but a few that I have noticed right away include the fact that my kids can:
Get along with each other.
Develop deeper relationships with grandparents.
Sit still when needed.
Make friends, yet still are capable of entertaining themselves.
Avoid bully situations.
Treat teachers with respect.
Work without making excuses.
Maintain a consistent routine that isn’t interrupted by another fire drill or pep rally.
Skip the mad scramble to get up and moving in the morning.
Avoid bedtime fights because we aren’t concerned about the morning scramble.
Final Thoughts
Homeschooling is absolutely amazing. I don’t know why I defended public school for as long as I did.
If you wife wants to homeschool, give her a chance. Let her have the opportunity to pursue the idea, and support her. The worst case scenario that could happen is it goes back to what it was, and she loves you for believing in her and supporting her in the endeavor.
The best case scenario that could happen is you watch her raise successful children who still love you when they are adults and take care of you in your old age. Plus, you will have a wife who is completely fulfilled and happy as a wife and mother.
So your wife wants to homeschool? That’s awesome!
Stay faithful,
P.S. If you want to do some more research into the topic of homeschooling, I would recommend some of these books. If you aren’t the reading type, see if you can find them on an audio book and listen to it while you work out or commute.
